The Master Game: Unmasking the Secret Rulers of the World [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Just to be clear, this book is essentially a new edition of "Talisman," which has been out of print in the US for several years and was something of an underground gem as it was not much publicized by its now defunct publisher, Element Books. Hancock and Bauval have taken the bones of "Talisman" and added on new material that bookends that work into a new theory that addresses the massive global issue of our time: the struggle between Islam and the West.

They are not afraid to be controversial. Some of the material regarding 9/11 in particular is likely to rile establishment parrots and truthers alike. It's a massive book - 636 pages with 81 photos - and it's hard to get through some of it. The payoff comes eventually, though, for those who stay the course - and their controversial conclusions will not seem nearly as far fetched once you've sucked in the couple of millennia's worth of global history leading up to them.

Definitely recommended for those who missed "Talisman," and even for those familiar with that work there is enough new material here to make it a worthwhile purchase, IMHO.

This book is essentially a revised "Talisman", an earlier book by the same authors; it is misleading and cynical to give it a completely new name without even a reference to "Talisman" on the front (or even back) cover to warn potential readers.

Worth getting by those who did not read "Talisman" because of its historic detail and good use of original sources. A big book (600 pages), the authors do excellent work in tracing ancient gnostic "heresy" from Egypt to the contemporary West. They offer a coherent thread for an underground movement spanning millennia; illuminating, for instance, the spiritual and esoteric aspects of the French Revolution that many others overlook. Their coverage of the influence of ancient Egypt on the designs of major cities like London, Paris and Washington D.C. was amazing when "Talisman" was published.

However a number of more recent books explore in more depth the similarities of the Hindu, Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions (really different sects of the same religion) with the earlier Egyptian solar cult. (Just two examples: church congregations face east (the direction of sunrise and solar rebirth) to pray while Muslims pray towards a black stone that was the center of moon cult worship. "Observant Jews" wear two small black boxes - like miniature versions of the Islamic Kaaba. In the Comments section I suggest just a few books explaining much more about the relationships between many religions.)

The Egyptian roots of today's religions have since been far better addressed by many others, including Acharya S, Ralph Ellis and Michael Tsarion. Over the last decade the uncovering of what had been kept secret from us for thousands of years has been moving so rapidly that this book already exhibits a disappointing lack of penetration into the hidden/esoteric secrets underlying religion when compared to the works of Pierre Sabak as well as Tsarion, Ellis & Acharya, all of whom use etymology (tracing the origin and development of words). These, and other excellent books, like Icke's "Human Race" and Farrell's "Babylon's Banksters", Swerdlow's "Blue Blood, True Blood" and Shannon Dorey's books on the Dogon religion all reveal a truer version of humankind's history than we have previously been allowed to know.

Later notes:
- Santos Bonacci is fascinating in his many youtube presentations - finally, everything (absolutely everything!) linked together in a (comparatively) simple manner.
- Mauro Biglino spent a decade translating the original Bible for the Vatican until he found out what they were doing with it. In the comments section I have added the link to Biglino's presentation on youtube (English subtitles).
- Frank O'Collins of Ucadia.com offers massive amounts of information on the "secret rulers" (whom he points out repeatedly are mentally ill) spread over a dozen websites and hundreds of hours of radio presentations on talkshoe - don't miss.

This book provides extensive research and detail on, as far as I can tell, two topics:

1. The brutalities of the Catholic Church in suppressing dissent, truth, heresy, and knowledge. It covers this story from the beginnings of the Catholic Church in the fourth century AD until the ascent of England as the dominant world power.

2. The Masons and a litany of architectural anomalies and coincidences. It covers this story from the time of the Knights Templar (presumably, the forerunners of the Masons) to such modern architecture as I.M. Pei's pyramid at the Louvre.

If you have an interest in this kind of history, this book will be a page turner for you. You'll turn about 600 pages. Unfortunately, this book obviously was not proofread. So as you turn those pages, you can't help but notice that typos and misspellings abound. To me, that's a serious defect.

Another defect is the book doesn't seem to be written with a point in mind. While I enjoyed reading the history, I finished the book not understanding why the authors wrote it or what point they were trying to make. Yes, they did state a concluding point but it didn't seem to derive from the rest of the book.

This is really several books in one, or at least several themes that appear to stand separately. For example, there's a book that gives you some history of the Cathars, another book that gives you some history of the Knights Templar, and another book that discusses writings of Hermes Trismegistus. The authors don't explain how these tie together. That said, it is some seriously interesting material to read.

The Master Game ends with a 20-page chapter that talks about Masonry and jihads, concluding that the secular leaders need to get the Muslims and Christians to set aside their animosity toward each other. That's a good sentiment as far as it goes. But it ignores the fact that most of the Western world isn't Christian (non-Muslim Europeans tend to be agnostic), even if we lump Catholics into that category.

Only at the end of the book did it dawn on me that the authors were positing that the folks running the world are the Masons. But they don't make a case for that theory. Yes, many prominent people have been Masons. But they also probably ate peas. So what?

With so much detail in the history of Catholic suppression, the Cathars, etc., we suddenly leap into "these people were Masons, so Masons must be running the world." But the evidence the authors provide of Mason influence is in architecture, not politics or banking. As the Masons came out of the building trades, their influence in architecture is a given.

So I don't see that this book answers the question posed by its title and subtitle. There is a conclusion, but I don't see its relevance to the rest of the book.

Except for loosely arguing that the Masons rule the world, this book doesn't reveal who the "secret rulers" are. I had expected to read something about Goldman Sachs or another of today's powerful criminal enterprises, but this book spends most of its time hundreds of years in the past and then rapidly moves through the American and French Revolutionary times and on to today. But it spends very little time on anything that's happened in this century or even the previous one.

Consider what would happen if a researcher decided to answer the following two questions:

1. How did Obama, who had the worst federal spending record in the US Senate, manage to get put on the Presidential ballot in the middle of an economic crisis made worse by federal spending?

2. Why are so many of Obama's top folks, and nearly all with any financial oversight, from Goldman Sachs?

Or consider how research into those two questions would lead us into looking at how the massive stealing (they call it "spending") of the Obama, Bush, and Clinton Presidencies has produced a national debt greater now than $200 trillion (far above the official figures) or why the USA now spends more on the military than the rest of the world combined.

Yet, none of this was even hinted at in the book. And I don't see how today's gangsta government has anything to do with Catholic popes who died fifteen or sixteen centuries ago on another continent.

This book provides an interesting ride through history. But to see who the secret rulers of the world are, you just need to follow the money. The master game is one of stealing, and those who run the game are accumulating the money. The alignments of buildings in London and Paris aren't explained by the greed and destruction we see from today's elite.